iCloud email sees worldwide disruption of service

Apple iCloud users from New York to London are seeing selective outages of service that leave them without access to their iCloud mail accounts, a problem that has persisted for over a day.

An Apple Support Community page was on Apr. 17 discussing the disruption of service and now has over 100 replies from affected users in the North America, Europe and as far as New Caledonia.

According to forum members who spoke with Apple support representatives, the outage is sporadic and does not affect a large number of iCloud users, however it seems that the problem is not confined to a specific area. The company's iCloud status page reports that less than one percent of all users are seeing problems with the mail service, and a fix is expected "ASAP."

"What is even more concerning is that after a 50 minute phone call, not one person (tech support, senior advisor, program leader, nor engineering department) had known that this was a pervasive issue. Not one," writes Apple Support forum member 'stadrummer.' "My account has been passed to the engineering department and I should hear back by tomorrow."

It was reported in January that over 85 million users had signed up for iCloud since its debut in October 2011, a rate that outpaced device sales at the time.

Affected users have no access to their iCloud mail accounts, whether it be from the web client to their iPhones, which points to a problem with a specific backend issue most likely originating from the company's separate mail servers. Apple's status page claims that only mail is affected while all other iCloud assets remain fully functional.

In December 2011, its was reported that U.S. .mac and .me users were experiencing problems with mail coming from Roadrunner and Comcast domains, though outgoing messages were left unaffected. The cause was ultimately found to be an accidental engagement of Apple's spam filters.

The source of the most recent issue is as yet unknown, and Apple hasn't released any information regarding the matter.

The service has been intermittent ever since the iPad 3 launch. 2-3 times a day the server will stop accepting passwords and Mail will go offline. All you can do is leave it half an hour and try reconnecting.

My theory is that most iPad 3 buyers are opting in to the free 5GB iCloud account, and the mail servers are being overwhelmed. I think they should use Apple PNS to notify devices of new emails, and only then turn IMAP on long enough to fetch the new message, then turn it off again. It would shift load from the IMAP servers to the PNS servers, which have proven far more scalable. Non-Apple clients can off course just keep using pure IMAP.

Gmail was flaky for a good part of the day yesterday. My private email service was down on and off for a day a couple of weeks ago. It's certainly frustrating, but it happens. Having more than one email address/provider these days is a must.

My @me.com account created a few months ago never worked consistently for me. I often I get error messages when I check email on my iPhone that email cannot be accessed on that account. Can't switch from gmail because of this.

Amusingly, e-mail and notes are the two iCloud services that I don't use.

Quote:

Originally Posted by richsadams

Gmail was flaky for a good part of the day yesterday. My private email service was down on and off for a day a couple of weeks ago. It's certainly frustrating, but it happens. Having more than one email address/provider these days is a must.

Yup, even Gmail goes out. However, that doesn't help when someone sends to the address that's out of service.

I'm using an e-mail forwarding service (which forwards to two different e-mail providers), but if the forwarding service goes out, again that's a vulnerability for incoming mail.

In addition to Mail asking me for my .me email password, I had an error message on my Mac that said I was almost out of space for my iCloud email account. Now that I'm back in, it says that I have 23GB of 25GB free.

I and many other iCloud users experienced this same disruption on March 24. And just like this time tech support was completely unaware of the outage. As a result they had users go thru all Kinds of unnecessary trouble shooting and resettings. I spent at least four hours on the phone with tech support. The problem started early in the morning and was not resolved until around 5 pm EDT when Apple finally posted on the iCloud status page that there was an outage and service would be restored "ASAP." Within 20 minutes of posting this notice service was restored. But that didn't stop tech support from"escalating" my problem and sending me another set of trouble-shooting instructions. All of which duplicated everything I'd previously been instructed to do, all of course unneccesarily because the problem all along was Apple's iCloud email servers. It would be nice if tech support knew what was happening on the network, or that they could see that thousands of other users are experiencing the same problem. Then maybe they wouldn't drag innocent Apple iCloud subscribers through the hell of needlessly resetting or tweaking everything on their computers, or IOS devices.

Less than 1% of users (that could mean .0001%) have problems, and those are not localized to any specific area (in fact... the person using iCloud mail right next to you might have NO problem!) ... And that translates to iCloud having a worldwide disruption of service? ... Are you padding your resume looking for a job with the National Enquirer?

From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" -...

I am having troubles too - with Mail and logging onto iCloud.com. Eh, it's free (at least for a lot of us), I don't know why we'd expect reliable service. When (if) Apple tries to make a dent in the enterprise, they'll have acceptable up-times.

And to respond to an earlier post, no, they don't use Mac minis for their servers, they use Oracle, on probably Linux or Sun platforms, probably virtual machines....